I decide to publish my chess engine plays on bitbucket. Well it is almost a redo from scratch of a complete but buggy chess engine I wrote in the past that I decided to rewrite just because it was difficult to stack into the old code what I learned. The version present when I write this post contains just the move generator and the complete test for it ( I used an other nice engine: roce to compare my perft test results against. What is a perft test ? Well it is a test to prove our engine produces, from a starting board, all the possible different boards in a certain number of ply, accordingly to the chess game rules. This test also give an idea on how fast is the strategy we use to generate moves, even if this can affect just in part the overall performance of the alpha/beta pruning, we should not write a slow blobby monster. Lets see below a session of the test working:

What is the performance ? Since almost all chess engine are written in C++ or in C, can a C# engine works at the same level of magnitude of performance ? Here below the performance we have for the starting position:

So almost the same, that is good if we remember that we wrote in C# We just used a little hack: as you probably know ( or will know if you will start playing with chess engines development ) chess engines uses hash tables to store information about a board ( by using hashes against Zobrist Keys ) this tabled is sored in an unamanaged big memory array, this achieved a really sensible increase in performances.

We can use the move generator as is to validate game moves in a two human player UI, or generating fancy images from FEN positions, write a WPF ( another ) chess board ( winboard compatible? so a lot of engines are already written for it) and so on.